Category Archives: Technology

Before You Take to the Clouds

… where you are likely to experience asphyxia, hallucinations, brain-damage, and death, make sure you secure your rights, namely:

  1. You own your data,
  2. you’re entitled to the service levels you are promised, and
  3. you have a right to come down when you’re ready to breathe again!

As per James Urquhart’s “Cloud Computing Bill of Rights”, your data is your data. This means that the vendor:

  • must never claim any ownership of any data you upload, create, generate, modify, host, or otherwise associate with your IP;
  • must always provide you with APIs that not only allow you to upload data as needed, but to download all of your data in a standard format at any time; and
  • must inform you where your data is being hosted and must host only at those locations you agree to.

Furthermore, while it is your responsibility to undertake any integration and perform any necessary maintenance that may be required, from time to time, that you agree to, it is fundamentally the vendor’s responsibility to meet the service targets they promise. This means that vendors:

  • must do everything in their power to meet service level targets;
  • must monitor service levels and give customers access to the same metrics and logs they use to monitor those service levels;
  • must not terminate your contract for any reason not explicitly stated as grounds for termination in the contract; and
  • must not invoke “act of nature”, “act of god”, or force majeure clauses except for true force majeure events which could not be predicted or prevented against (occasional loss of power from the main provider or loss of internet from the main provider is to be expected and power, internet, and other key systems must be fully redundant, etc.).

But most importantly, you have a right to come down when you’re ready to breathe again! The vendor, subject to the terms of the agreement:

  • must let you extract all of your data and end the contract whenever you have the right to;
  • must not charge you to download your data; and
  • must not charge you any additional fees other than any early termination penalties you agree to.

It’s your data. It’s your solution. It’s your business. And if you decide down the road that you don’t want to experience asphyxia, hallucinations, brain-damage, and death, that’s your right!

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Want To Speed Up? Slow Down!

I really enjoyed this recent article in the Harvard Business Review on “the acceleration trap” and how corporations often take on more than they can handle when faced with intense market pressures by increasing the number and speed of their activities, raising performance goals, shortening innovation cycles, and introducing new management technologies or organizational systems at a furious and frenetic pace until employee motivation is sapped, the company’s focus is scattered in various directions, and exhaustion and resignation blanket the company which enters a rapid downward spiral.

It happens more often than one might think. And even if it doesn’t bring a company down, it can bring down a department. The worst scenario is when a company, after waiting, waiting, waiting almost forever to upgrade antiquated and failing systems decides it is going to do a big-bang upgrade in record time and decides to go, go, go before anyone plans, outlines, or even thinks about what they are doing. (There’s a reason that at least 70% of technology initiatives fail to some degree. This is usually it.) That’s why sometimes the best way to speed up is to slow down, take a step back, figure out what’s important and needs to be done, develop a plan of action, and then attack it with zest, but not so much zealousness that all of the employees will burn out before it’s done and success is achieved. Otherwise, you might be the next FoxMeyer.

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What’s the ROI of Online Collaboration and Communication Technology?

It’s hard to say, as it depends on what the technology is, what it can do, and how readily (and often) it’s embraced by your people, but it’s probably worth it. Video conferencing reduces travel (which not only takes up time, but costs money at an average of over 1,000 a trip per person), online document sharing reduces wait-times (when you have to rely on mail or courier), and online inter-enterprise information sharing reduces issue resolution time (as compared to phone and fax tag).

If the tools enable collaboration, and you use them with the intent of collaboration, they certainly have ROI, as evidenced by this recent article in Talent Management on “What’s Your Return on Collaboration?”. According to the article, an implementation of an online meeting and conference solution at SAP generated the following returns for the company:

  • a reduction of the average meeting time by 20% which reduces the average amount of time an employee spends in meetings each week by over an hour and a half
  • a reduction in meeting start-up time by over 85% which can save another hour a week if an employee has to attend between 7 and 10 meetings
  • a reduction in travel costs by over 33% which is generally more than what you will save if you just negotiate better rates
  • a 4-fold increase in collaboration attempts — when it’s easier to try and work with someone than work alone, collaboration happens

Now, this is only one case study, but it’s still impressive. Make it easy for your employees to work together, and they will.

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Done Innovating? No Problem. You can still succeed!

And you don’t have to go waiving NDAs around either. You can stop pretending that you’re still innovating when we all know discovery ended long ago. Thanks to the breadth of today’s marketplace, you have options beyond selling out to a bottom feeder who’ll amalgamate your technology with five other dying products, cross-sell existing product lines, and then milk the maintenance dry.

You can instead choose a strategic “bold retreat”. So if you lack the finances, necessary capabilities, or simply the drive to transition to new technologies and invent new solutions, you can choose to retreat to a defensible niche where your old technology conveys a decisive advantage. Just like Linjett continues to succeed in the leisure sailboat market by focussing on the enthusiast, like Continental continues to succeed with piston engines by focussing on small private aircraft, and like StorageTek continues to sell magnetic tape drives (yes, magnetic tape drives) by focussing on large scale data archives, you can succeed too!

Haven’t upgraded your e-Negotiation platform in five years? No problem! Just ditch the Fortune 500 market and focus on the mid-market where most companies still haven’t adopted a solution. It’ll be new to them for five more years!

Haven’t upgraded your BI tool in five years? No problem! Streamline your integration with the big ERP tools that your average Fortune 500 can’t get rid off. Become the BI tool of choice in that market and continue to rake in recurring maintenance fees at 22% year after year.

Haven’t upgraded your catalog-based e-Marketplace in five years? No problem! Follow the crowd and rebrand it as a “supplier network”. Now it’s new for five more years!

In other words, you can fail at modern technology but still win if you’re bold about it! (Of course, whether or not your customers win is a completely different story.)

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Analysts, Schmanalysts

According to Gartner’s latest blog post (in Thursday’s thoughts), the super secret formula to gaining information about a vendor’s product is the “scripted demo”.

Here’s the Big Idea: you ask the vendor how to accomplish the “applicable tasks you do most often”, and then you ask the vendor to demonstrate, step by step, how to do them.

Well, that’s a terrific idea if the vendor has nothing new or innovative to show you, and if both of you are as dull as dishwater. If all you want the vendor to do is show you how to accomplish some mundane  business task that you already do every day, then you’ll never see anything the least bit interesting or innovative. Plus, given time, the vendor will “polish” that part of the demo so it looks much more impressive than it really is.

Here’s some free advice to business and technology analysts who have to evaluate products:

  1. DON’T ask the vendor to do ordinary things.Ask the vendor to show you extraordinary things. Sometimes those extraordinary things can be quite ordinary on the surface, like making it possible for ordinary users to employ highly complex technology successfully and usefully. Problem is, you actually have to understand what’s going on under the covers to figure out whether it’s extraordinary, or just something that’s actually quite simple, or even something that’s just plain technically impossible, and therefore a load of bull (see point 3, below). If all you have is an MBA, chances are that you can’t make that evaluation.
  2. DON’T count mouse clicks.Count innovations that could really make a difference for your clients and their businesses.
  3. DON’T assume that you know anything about technology.Instead, hire (or rent) someone who does, to save you from drawing uninformed conclusions about stuff you don’t (and might never) understand. If you bring someone to the party who can’t be buffaloed by technobabble and a pretty UI, then you don’t have to worry about “scripted” or “unscripted” demos.
  4. DON’T test for “100 features and often many more — up to 500 features” to finalize a rating.That’s just “checklist testing”, and it’s not very useful. Fact is, only a few features matter; the rest are bells and whistles that nobody cares about. You need to do a deep dive on what’s important, not worry about who has the longest checklist. It’s exactly this “please the reviewer” attitude that contributed to bloatware like Microsoft Word — a product that, after years of introducing new whiz-bang features that only ever half-worked, still couldn’t get basic bulleted lists to function properly as late as Word 2003.

The other Big Idea in the Gartner article is References. Well, references are a slippery slope. Does the reference customer understand the technology? Probably not. Does he understand what else is out there? Almost certainly not. Does he think his (pick one: RFx engine, spend analysis tool, contracts management system, etc.) is the greatest thing since sliced bread? Maybe, but who cares? He could be using a crappy tool of marginal value in comparison to what he could be using and have no clue. You could interview him until the cows come home, and not learn a thing, except that he’s a happy lemming with no idea he’s about to run off a cliff.

Fact is, the old model of analysts running around interviewing and briefing the vendors that pay them, and then running off to interview the customers that the paying vendor has teed up, and therefore thinking that they’re somehow “getting a feel for what’s out there and what’s good”, is so … over. All you end up creating for your final report is an unappetizing mashup of the marketing nonsense of all the big vendors.

No wonder everyone is running to the web for guidance. Or running for the hills.

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